The Pygmalion Effect by Victor I. Stoichita, 2008, University of Chicago Press

Lucretius, in On the Nature of Things (first century BC)…

Now, sinCe I have explained what is the nature of the mid, from what elements it now takes its strength when combined with the body, and how when torn away from the body it returns to its first elements, you shall now see me begin to deal with what is of high importance for this subject, and to show that there exist what we call images of things.

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W.H.D. Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982, 4.25 – 35, p. 279)

For Lucretius, the simulacrum is an in-between, an ambiguous object between the body and the mind, which “like films drawn from the outermost surface of things, flit about hither and thither through the air.” (ibid, 4.88 – 89, p.281). A mind-body, a body-mind, therefore. To what degree is of little importance, says Lucretius; what does matter is that “there exist what wee call images of things”.

Gilles Deleuze, in a work that would become famous, showed that the real warhorse of Platonism was not the “icon-image” engendered by mimesis, a view long ascribed to and even upheld, but “the other image,” the image whose principal nature resides not in “resemblance” but in “existence”: the simulacrum (Deleuze, Différence et Repetition, 1968, 165 – 168 and Logique du sens, 1969, p. 292-307). An artificial construct, devoid of an original model, the simulacrum is rendered as existing in and of itself. It does not necessarily copy an object from the world, but projects itself into the world. It exists.

The simulacrum is a made object, an “artifact”, which can at most produce an “effect of resemblance” (Deleuze, Logique du sens, 297), masking all the while the absence of a model by an excess of its own “hyper-reality” (Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation, 1981, p. 321). Jean Baudrillard sees this as one of the traps of modernity, not only in the advantage that has been gained over the icon, but in the degree to which the strength of the simulacrum threatens reality itself. In his view, the simulacrum explodes the established order of Western representation, based on the notion of mimesis, and goes even further to transcend it and invalidate it, in the name of the illusions of a postmodern “ideology” and “lifestyle”. Through the modern triumph of the simulacrum, reality itself is replaced by the simulation of the realty.

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In the present day, post-Nietzche (and post0Freud), no one can continue to doubt that the images fabricated by man are vessels of power, devices of desire, and that not only creativity but also the contemplation of images obey impulses, among which the erotic ones are, if not the only such impulses, at least certainly some of the strongest (Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, 1989). It is not, therefore, the libidinal component of creativity and the contemplation of images which is surprising or problematic, but the use with which is made of it. It is precisely this question the Pygmalion myth poses.

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